But the torture had only begun for Father Mattingly.
For weeks after, he’d been truly obsessed-those women, that house …
But he could not act upon what he had heard any more than he could repeat it. The confessional bound him to secrecy in deed and word.
He did not dare even question Sister Bridget Marie, though she volunteered enough information when he happened to see her on the playground. He felt guilty for listening, but he could not bring himself to move away.
“Sure, they’ve put Deirdre in the Sacred Heart, they have. But do you think she’ll stay there? They expelled her mother, Antha, when she was but eight years old. And from the Ursulines too she was expelled. They found a private school for her finally, one of those crazy places where they let the children stand on their heads. And what an unhappy thing she was as a young girl, always writing poetry and stories and talking to herself and asking questions about how her mother had died. And you know it was murder, don’t you, Father, that Stella Mayfair was shot dead by her brother Lionel? And at a fancy dress ball in that house, he did it. Caused a regular stampede. Mirrors, clocks, windows, everything broken by the time the panic was over, and Stella lying dead on the floor.”
Father Mattingly only shook his head at the pity of it.
“No wonder Antha went wild after, and not ten years later took up with a painter, no less, who never bothered to marry her, leaving her in a four-story walk-up in Greenwich Village in the middle of winter with no money and little Deirdre to take care of, so that she had to come home in shame. And then to jump from that attic window, poor thing, but what a hellish life it was with her aunts picking on her and watching her every move and locking her up at night, and her running down to the French Quarter and drinking, mind you, at her age, with the poets and the writers and trying to get them to pay attention to her work. I’ll tell you a strange secret, Father. For months after she died, letters came for her, and manuscripts of hers came back from the New York people to whom she’d sent them. And what an agony for Miss Carlotta, the postman bringing her a reminder of such pain and suffering when he rang the bell at the gate.”
Father Mattingly said his silent prayer for Deirdre. Let the shadow of evil not touch her.
“There was one of Antha’s stories in a magazine, they told me, published in Paris, they said, but it was all in English, and that come too to Miss Carlotta and she took one look at it and locked it away. ’Twas one of the Mayfair cousins told me that part of it, and how they offered to take the baby off her hands-little Deirdre-but she said no, she’d keep it, she owed that to Stella, and to Antha, and to her mother, and to the child itself.”
Father Mattingly stopped in the church on his way back to the rectory. He stood for a long time in the silent chamber of the sacristy looking through the door at the main altar.
For a sordid history he could forgive the Mayfairs easily enough. They were born ignorant into this world like the rest of us. But for warping a little girl with lies of the devil who drove a mother to suicide? But there was nothing, absolutely nothing, Father Mattingly could do but pray for Deirdre as he was praying now.
Deirdre was expelled from St. Margaret’s Private Academy near Christmastime and her aunts packed her off to a private school up north.
Some time after that he’d heard she was home again, sickly, studying with a governess, and once after that he did glimpse her at a crowded ten o’clock Mass. She had not come to Communion. But he had seen her seated in the pew with her aunts.
More and more of the Mayfair story came to him in bits and pieces. Seems everybody in the parish knew he’d been to that house. Over a kitchen table, Grandma Lucy O’Hara took his hand. “So I hear Deirdre Mayfair’s been sent away, and you’ve been to that house on her account, is that not so, Father?” What on earth could he say? And so he listened.
“Now I know that family. Mary Beth, she was the grande dame, she could tell you all about how it had been on the old plantation, born there right after the Civil War, didn’t come to New Orleans until the 1880s, though, when her uncle Julien brought her. And such an old southern gentleman he was. I can still remember Mr. Julien riding his horse up St. Charles Avenue; he was the handsomest old man I ever saw. And that was a real grand plantation house at Riverbend, they said, used to be pictures of it in the books even when it was all falling down. Mr. Julien and Miss Mary Beth did everything they could to save it. But you can’t stop the river when the river has a mind to take a house.
“Now, she was a real beauty, Mary Beth, dark and wild-looking, not delicate like Stella-or plain like Miss Carlotta-and they said Antha was a beauty though I never did get to see her, or that poor baby Deirdre. But Stella was a real true voodoo queen. Yes, I mean Stella, Father. Stella knew the powders, the potions, the ceremonies. She could read your fortune in the cards. She did it to my grandson, Sean, frightened him half out of his wits with the things she told him. That was at one of those wild parties up there on First Street when they were swilling the bootleg liquor and had a dance band right there in the parlor. That was Stella.
“She liked my Billy, she did.” Sudden gesture to the faded photograph on the bureau top. “The one who died in the War. I told him, ‘Billy, you listen to me. Don’t you go near the Mayfair women.’ She liked all the handsome young men. That’s how come her brother killed her. On a clear day she could make the sky above you cloud over. That’s the God’s truth, Father. She used to scare the sisters at St. Alphonsus making storms like that right over the garden. And when she died that night, you should have seen the storm over that house. Why, they said, every window in the place was broken. Rain and wind like a hurricane around that place. Stella made the heavens weep for her.”
Speechless, Father Mattingly sat, trying to like the tepid tea full of milk and sugar, but he was remembering every word.
He didn’t call on the Mayfairs anymore. He didn’t dare. He could not have that child think-if she was there at all-that he meant to tell what he was bound forever to keep secret. He watched for the women at Mass. He seldom saw them. But this was a big parish of course. They could have gone to either church, or to the little chapel for the rich over there in the Garden District.
Miss Carlotta’s checks were coming in, however. That he knew. Father Lafferty, who did the accounts for the parish, showed him the check near Christmastime-it was for two thousand dollars-quietly remarking on how Carlotta Mayfair used her money to keep the world around her nice and quiet.
“They’ve sent the little niece home from the school in Boston, I suppose you heard that.”
Father Mattingly said that he hadn’t. He stood in the door of Father Lafferty’s office, waiting …
“Well, I thought you got on famous with those ladies,” Father Lafferty said. Father Lafferty was a plainspoken man, older than his sixty years, not a gossip.
“Only visited once or twice,” said Father Mattingly.
“Now they’re saying little Deirdre’s sickly,” Father Lafferty said. He laid the check down on the green blotter of his desk, looked at it. “Can’t go to regular school, has to stay home with a private tutor.”
“Sad thing.”
“So it seems. But nobody’s going to question it. Nobody’s going to go over and see if that child’s really getting a decent education.”
“They have money enough … ”
“Indeed, enough to keep everything quiet, and they always have. They could get away with murder.”
“You think so?”